Books what I readed last year and ones what I might read in 2007!

[Dupin]

I realise that barely 2 hours have passed since the start of the New Year and one ought really to be thinking about the present and the future rather than the past. However, as a newcomer to these parts, I can’t resist the temptation to catch-up a little! Plus, (as Sugar appeared to sense elsewhere) I have a bit of a weakness for lists. Therefore, I’ll contribute something resembling a reading list for 2007 at some point soon (nothing concrete mind) but for the present, there will follow a list of books read in 2006…and just glancing at some of the excellent titles I can almost get nostalgic for that miserable year, ha!

Before I go any further, I’ll be the one to point out (before anybody else does) the distinct lack of female authors (aside from my dearest Daphne, Mary McCarthy, Mary Shelley and Carson McCullers). Ordinarily I reckon to chalk up a few Beryl Bainbridge, Anais Nin, Iris Murdoch and Patricia Highsmith books but for some reason my often spasmodic and reckless reading habits have resulted in a male-dominated year. I promise to rectify this as soon as possible.

Books Read in 2006

The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski
Metamorphosis and other Stories - Franz Kafka
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell
The Collected Stories of V.S. Pritchett
The Kings Depart - Richard M. Watt
All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
Three Men on a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
Who Killed Enoch Powell? – Arthur Wise
Salt is Leaving - J.B Priestley
More than Human - Theodore Sturgeon
The Pledge - Friedrich Durrenmatt
The Shape of Things to Come - H.G Wells
Tales of Terror from Outer Space - edited by R. Chetwynd-Hayes
How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World - Francis Wheen
Two Tales and Eight Tomorrows - Harry Harrison
A Wreath of Stars – Bob Shaw
Jesus on Mars – Philip Jose Farmer
The Group – Mary McCarthy
The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
Mother Night – Kurt Vonnegut
Philby - Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville
The Human Factor – Graham Greene
The Night of the Generals – Hans Hellmut Kirst
Cabot Wright Begins – James Purdy
The Watchers on the Shore – Stan Barstow
The Whisperers – Robert Nicolson
Kes – Barry Hines
Castle Keep – William Eastlake
The Stainless Steel Rat – Harry Harrison
How to Write a Novel – John Braine
A Kiss Before Dying – Ira Levin
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
The Manchurian Candidate – Richard Condon
Death Wish – Brian Garfield
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
England, My England – D.H Lawrence
I Am Legend – Richard Matheson
The Exorcist – William Peter Blatty
The Temple of the Golden Pavillion – Yukio Mishima
For Esme with Love and Squalor – J.D Salinger
The Taking of Pelham 123 – John Godey
Therese Raquin – Emile Zola
The Aunt’s Story – Patrick White
Steppenwolf – Hermann Hesse
In Their Wisdom – C.P Snow
The Birds and other Stories – Daphne DuMaurier
The Comic – Brian Glanville
On the Way I Lost It – Frankie Howerd (autobiography)
Titter Ye Not: The Life of Frankie Howerd – William Hall
Choke – Chuck Palahniuk
Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
The Man Who Held the Queen to Ransom and Sent Parliament Packing – Peter Van Greenaway
The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
Greybeard – Brian Aldiss
On the Beach – Nevil Shute
Dying Inside – Robert Silverberg
Firebug – Robert Bloch
The Drowned World – J.G Ballard
Hamlet – Bill thingy
York Notes on Hamlet – (yes, I have a nerve to include this!)
Death in the Fifth Position – Edgar Box (aka: Gore Vidal)
The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
Seven Days in May – Fletcher Knebel and Charles Bailey
Telefon – Walter Wager
The Skull of the Marquis de Sade – Robert Bloch
The Europeans – Henry James
Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
Literature and Western Man – J.B Priestley
Main Street – Sinclair Lewis
Goodbye to Berlin – Christopher Isherwood
Antic Hay – Aldous Huxley
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
William McGonagall: The Truth at Last – Spike Milligan
Don’t Look Now and other stories – Daphne DuMaurier
Baudolino – Umberto Eco
Have Space Suit Will Travel – Robert Heinlein
Miss Lonelyhearts – Nathaneal West
There is a Happy Land –Keith Waterhouse
The Scorpion God – William Golding
Clock Without Hands – Carson McCullers
The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology
In Between the Sheets – Ian McEwan


At present I’m still battling on with The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins and have approximately 80 pages left. It’s taken me a fortnight which may not seem a big deal but for the fact that I haven’t been to work for the past three weeks and have had ample time to read. I’m also carrying over into 2007: Exile and the Kingdom by Albert Camus and Little Herr Friedemann and other stories by Thomas Mann.

A list of proposed titles for this year will follow shortly, provided I keep out of charity shops (a trip to Oxfam usually results in a new influx and thereby a spanner in the gubbins!).

There! I’ve got it all out of my system now!

[Liz]

Wow. What a list!

Some great books there. I've read a few of them, but there are loads there that I would really like to read.

I can't wait to see what you will be reading in 2007!

[Sugar]

Plus, (as Sugar appeared to sense elsewhere) I have a bit of a weakness for lists.

Nuffin' if not insightful, me! :D

Hamlet – Bill thingy
York Notes on Hamlet – (yes, I have a nerve to include this!)
:lol: :sign0142: In fact, I don't think there is a smilie that shows quite how much I'm laughing at that!

[Dupin]

Thank you Sugar.

I intend to start a thread introducing members to Bill at some point. He could be the next big thing!

[Dupin]

...and Liz, the only book I'd make any attempt to prevent you reading is The Aunt's Story by Patrick White.

Words cannot express how excrutiating this book was. Not even the words of White himself could do justice to my irritation, ha!

[Kell]

Ooh, there's about half a dozen there on your 2006 list that I've read & enjoyed too. Nice mix you've got there. And we had a discussion some time ago about male/female authors & most of us seemed to have leaned one way or the other, if I recall. I think the majority of my books at the time were written by male authors & they still feature predominently on my shelves (well, I'm a huge Pratchett fan & I have all of his books, therefore a large chunk of shelf-space is taken up by him alone - LOL!).

I'm looking forward to seeing what your reading list for 2007 looks like!

[Liz]

...and Liz, the only book I'd make any attempt to prevent you reading is The Aunt's Story by Patrick White.

Words cannot express how excrutiating this book was. Not even the words of White himself could do justice to my irritation, ha!


Righty Ho. Comment taken on board. Thanks for the warning. :) :)

[Dupin]

Right then!

I’ve finally put a list together but first, the sermon!

Never before have I compiled a list of books to be read over a set period of time. Ordinarily, I make do with an ongoing mental list of what I consider priority and I normally succeed in striking the majority off the list. Therefore, I’m not quite sure how this log is going to work out. I could well be compelled to renege, over time, on most of the choices below or maybe I shall feel the need to stick more rigidly to them (especially now they’ve been posted here, before the eyes of the world!). Only time will tell.


The one thing I wouldn’t dare do is tackle them in any kind of order. That would be highly counterproductive in my case. For that reason I have compiled a pretty lengthy list which, for all I know, may not nearly be completed by this time next year (or perhaps even the year after that) but at least permits me a wide choice in terms of genre, style and size (i.e. length of the book). Experience tells me there’s nothing worse than reading something one is not in the mood to read. Therefore, the following 80 titles should allow me plenty of room for manoeuvre.

[Dupin]

2007 READING LIST

(Here are 40 because of character restrictions)

God Knows – Joseph Heller
Babbitt – Sinclair Lewis
The Victim – Saul Bellow
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Picnic at Hanging Rock – Joan Lindsay
McTeague – Frank Norris
USA – John Dos Passos
The Riverside Villas Murder – Kingsley Amis
Candy - Terry Southern
Martin Chuzzlewit – Charles Dickens
Another Part of the Wood – Beryl Bainbridge
Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
The L-Shaped Room – Lynne Reid Banks
Women in Love – D.H Lawrence
A Start in Life – Alan Sillitoe
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith – Thomas Kenneally
Narziss and Goldmund – Hermann Hesse
Pnin – Vladimir Nabokov
Winter Kills – Richard Condon
Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
An Accidental Man – Iris Murdoch
Men without Women – Ernest Hemingway
The Devils of Loudun – Aldous Huxley
Farewell My Lovely – Raymond Chandler
Black Dogs – Ian McEwan
The Shrinking Man – Richard Matheson
The Beautiful and Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Right True End – Stan Barstow
The Talented Mr Ripley – Patricia Highsmith
Legion – William Peter Blatty
Kipps – H.G Wells
Maggie Muggins – Keith Waterhouse
Little Birds – Anais Nin
Burr – Gore Vidal
Memories of Catholic Girlhood - Mary McCarthy
The Way of All Flesh – Samuel Butler
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
The Midwich Cuckoos – John Wyndham
Forbidden Colours – Yukio Mishima
Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino

[Dupin]

(the other 40)

Reflections in a Golden Eye – Carson McCullers
The Life of a Useless Man – Maxim Gorky
The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterton
Witchfinder General – Ronald Bassett
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Life at the Top – John Braine
No One Writes to the Colonel – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Flowers for Algernon – Daniel Keyes
Falconer – John Cheever
Claudius the God – Robert Graves
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake
Don Quixote – Miguel Cervantes
The Innocents Abroad – Mark Twain
America – Franz Kafka
All the King’s Men – Robert Penn Wright
Tropic of Capricorn – Henry Miller
Steps – Jerzy Kosinski
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Slapstick – Kurt Vonnegut
The Martian Chronicles – Ray Bradbury
Portnoy’s Complaint – Philip Roth
The Simultaneous Man – Ralph Blum
A Very British Coup – Chris Mullin
Scenes from Provincial Life – William Cooper
The Island of the Day Before – Umberto Eco
The Death of Artemio Cruz – Carlos Fuentes
Psycho – Robert Bloch
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Raise High the Roof Beam Carpenters / Seymour: An Introduction – J.D Salinger
Darkness Visible – William Golding
Rosemary’s Baby – Ira Levin
Prater Violet – Christopher Isherwood
Benighted – J.B Priestley
The Vatican Cellars – Andre Gide
The Day the Queen Flew to Scotland for the Grouse Shooting – Arthur Wise


Notice that no author appears twice on the list. This is a system I have tended to use (not always with success) over the past few years and I intend sticking with it. There have been times when I’ve completed a work by a certain author and felt the urge to plough straight into another one if I’ve enjoyed it to an unusually high level. However, I try to resist and keep to one author = one book per year. Regardless of how expansive a collection I may possess of a particular author’s work (if I continue with this system then I’m on target to read my last Anthony Burgess at some point after my 79th birthday!).

Ideally I shall stick to the choices above and also find time for those additions that arrive, like stowaways, into one’s possession and beg to be attended to at short notice. I aim to curb my fanatical book collecting this year but, although I’m off to a great start already (it being Jan 3rd an’ all), I know I won’t be going an entire year without the occasional purchase and these ‘emergencies’ should be accounted for. I don’t think it pays to neglect reading what one wants (sometimes desperately) to read purely for the sake of upholding a system.

Incidentally (and this note may prove to be largely for my own peace of mind), I haven’t listed many science-fiction novels. Not because I’m looking to trivialise that genre, but simply because I’m not as acquainted with it as I would like to be. However, I know I shall get an urge to read the work of some of the great sci-fi practitioners at some stage and the most likely candidates are Brian Aldiss, Harry Harrison, Bob Shaw, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley, Robert Heinlein, Robert Silverberg and a host of other writers named Robert!

…and if by, say, next December I have managed all of the above, THEN I shall dig out War and Peace!!!

[dogmatix]

Dupin, you're a mad man... but you've got good taste.

[Kell]

That's an impressive list. I spotted a few on there I'd like to try myself, but I've got to get through some of the ones i've already got sittnig on my shelf before I tackle them...

[Polka Dot Rock]

Hello Dupin!:welcome2:
I saw that you mentioned McTeague by Frank Norris: it's brilliant, do read it! I studied it for the first year of my degree, and I loved it. It's very dark, dismal and grisly but compulsively so.

I want to read Don Quixote too, particularly the new version of it as the artwork is super sexy. Err, I mean, the translation's meant to be excellent *ahem*

[Purple Poppy]

My goodness! Some serious reading. At the rate I read it would probably be a five list for me. However, Kell and NuttyMum might give you a run for your money.
I am not sure that lists and targets are always a good idea. Maybe a topic for a new thread here as I reckon we all have different ways of using lists and setting targets and reasons for doing or not doing lists. It has to be a balance though or else the pleasure is taken out of reading because of the unconscious (very conscious, in some cases) pressure to get down the list.
Good luck with it though and let us know your thoughts on some of them.

As for this Bill bloke...would be good to meet him. Think he's cropped up somewhere before...(scatches head);)

PP

[Kell]

LOL - I know for a fact that i won't read all the books on my own list - they're there because those are the unread books currently sitting onmy shelves, so I aim to try & read them all at some point, but there are a handful that have been tehre for more than a year now & I still haven't picked them up because more interesting-looking ones grab my attention.

And to tell the truth, one or two on some of the other lists on here are piquing my interest & I can see myself getting hold of them at some point myself! In fact there are several right here on your list, Dupin...

[Dupin]

Firstly, yes (Dogmatix) I am mad! And putting Henry Miller on my list only serves to convince me of just what a hopeless mental case I am!


Polka Dot Rock (may I call you Polka?), I have been itching to read McTeague since the day I purchased it from a charity shop in 2005. I'd never knowingly heard of Frank Norris at the time but the picture on the cover convinced me to purchase it because it was a still from legendary film director Erich Von Stroheim's silent classic Greed, made in 1924, and based on McTeague.


I'd seen the film several years before and was really knocked-out by it. Apparently, Von Stroheim went to phenomenal lengths to capture the mood and feel of Norris' novel, arriving at a final cut which lasted 9 hours! It was later shortened to a more modest 5 before finally arriving at a 2 and a half hour cut, carried out by a man who hadn't even read the script, much less the original novel. And yet, sources tell me that for an adapted screenplay it's remarkably faithful to it's original. I think you've just made me convince myself that I should start reading it imminently.


As for Don Quixote, it is such a legendary piece of literature I find it difficult (iconoclastic though I am) to pluck up the courage to actually read it. The mere sight of it leaves me daunted - and (alas) my copy doesn't even have “super sexy” artwork!


I experience much the same kind of affect when tackling Shakey Bill! He and Cervantes are such towering figures that it seems far easier to stand on the sidelines, bowing to them than to actually read them, ha!


Incidentally, a bit of useless trivia: Shakey and Cervantes are alleged to have died on the same day!


Oh, and Purple Poppy, you're not likely to tackle a reading list as expansive as mine when you're too busy with other, more frivolous pursuits, like writing books of your own! Don't you realise that reading at every available opportunity is the ideal way of leaving ones own literary ambitions on the backburner forever, ha!


Kell, your situation is a familiar one. I too set out to read this or that, only to have my attention diverted by something else. A new addition to my shelves (or, rather, stacks) will often have that effect but I frequently fall beneath the spell of something I've had hanging around for ages, and for no apparent reason. If you like, you can tell me which of the titles on my list you already possess. I'll prioritise them and read them for you and then you can read some of the stuff I've had hanging around since the late 90s. Does that sound fair?


Anyway, thank you all for your encouragement. I realise none of you really believe I'll manage to read all 80, but maybe that's just your way of sparing me on, ha!

[Purple Poppy]

Dupin said

Oh, and Purple Poppy, you're not likely to tackle a reading list as expansive as mine when you're too busy with other, more frivolous pursuits, like writing books of your own! Don't you realise that reading at every available opportunity is the ideal way of leaving ones own literary ambitions on the backburner forever, ha!



LOL. yes it has begun to dawn on me that it might be difficult as I'm writing an average 2000-3000 words a day, but KW manages so I will just have to try. And anyway, as I say it might be trivial and rubbish , in which case I'll just go back to reading. Much safer methinks....but we'll see!

PP

[Liz]

Now that is a list and a half that you've got there, Dupin.

[Dupin]

I know and I feel greedy!

Wanna split it?

[Liz]

Well, you have got some very nice books there.

I notice you've got Talented Mr. Ripley on your 2007 list. I read that last year - thought it was fab. I now want to have a go at the others in the series.